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radicalfashion - odori
had enough of the pounding beats of electro ?
worn down by hip hop mashups, bored by 80s pop
revival, and battered to death by amped up guitars.
then this calm 30 minute combination of technology
and piano loops could indeed bring you right back to all that is good about
music. radicalfashion is the name for hirohito ihara and
this debut album is coming out via the rather fine hefty records label.
quite simply, the core focus of the album is the
piano, and so, with the drifting arpeggios and sunrise melodies that follow
the opening real world ambience of opening, you could be easily
mistaken to believe that the album is a mispressing, and you’d stumbled upon
a bastardised pirate rip of an old richard clayderman album.
thankfully, this is not the case. as the album
progresses, sonic twists and turns develop subtly making you glad you
didn’t hit the eject button.
modern styled machine loops, vocals cutups and all
manner of delicate head turning production comes into play giving one reason
to recall the more serene moments of aphex twin. two of the
highlights feature carl stone, whoever he is, work really well
despite being somewhat at odds with the rest of the album, the fractured
clicks and cutup flute sample throughout thousand and gently
unsettling distortion in usunibi stretch the established template.
another favourite is shunpoudoh with its
cutup vocal samples making it come across as a delightful mix of art
of noise and jean michel jarre’s zoolook
project in which jarre built whole tracks around midi’d up vocal
samples, radicalfashion revisits this idea and mellows the results with the
childlike playful piano melodies.
enough of the words, in sumamry, it’s a lovely
special little album for those that want a marriage of piano melodies and
so-called laptop crunchiness.
simple as.
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